This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Basil Hallward paints a portrait of a young man of extraordinary beauty, and puts more of himself into it than he means to. Lord Henry Wotton looks at the finished canvas and says the thing that ruins everyone: youth is the only thing worth having, and Dorian Gray is going to lose it.
Standing in front of his own portrait, Dorian makes a wish — that the picture might age and he might stay as he is. The wish is granted. What follows is not a ghost story but something worse: a young man who never pays for anything, and a portrait in a locked room that pays for everything. Wilde takes his hero through London's drawing rooms, a shabby theatre in the East End, opium dens, and a shooting party in the country, and lets him become steadily more charming and steadily more monstrous.
The novel caused a scandal in 1890 and was used against Wilde at his trial five years later. It remains the most quoted novel of the nineteenth century: "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." "Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic." "Each of us has heaven and hell in him."
This is the complete 1891 twenty-chapter text, unabridged: the version Wilde revised and defended, including the notorious "chapter eleven" survey of sensation and the expanded final chapters.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is by turns a society comedy, a horror story, and a meditation on art, beauty and conscience — and it is still the book people reach for when they want to understand what Oscar Wilde was really about.
This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
